In Propack's material dialogue, there is a checkbox "animateable", does this work like the cams? I tried it once, but it didn't seem to work? Any insight?

This feature allows you to animate such things as the colour of the model, the transparency, reflection size etc., in short all of the sliders in the materials dialogue box. I find it most useful for transparency. Due to a glitch it doesn't always save correctly and you also need to set both the start and end frames on the timeline...